You will be ill, and break down.' 'I have, it is true, been up a little late this last week,' he said
cheerfully. 'In fact, I couldn't tear myself away from the equatorial;
it is such a wonderful possession that it keeps me there till daylight.
But what does that matter, now I have made the discovery?' 'Ah, it _does_ matter! Now, promise me--I insist--that you will not
commit such imprudences again; for what should I do if my Astronomer
Royal were to die?' She laughed, but far too apprehensively to be effective as a display of
levity.
They parted, and he went home to write out his paper. He promised to
call as soon as his discovery was in print. Then they waited for the
result.
It is impossible to describe the tremulous state of Lady Constantine
during the interval. The warm interest she took in Swithin St.
Cleeve--many would have said dangerously warm interest--made his hopes
her hopes; and though she sometimes admitted to herself that great
allowance was requisite for the overweening confidence of youth in the
future, she permitted herself to be blinded to probabilities for the
pleasure of sharing his dreams. It seemed not unreasonable to suppose
the present hour to be the beginning of realization to her darling wish
that this young man should become famous. He had worked hard, and why
should he not be famous early? His very simplicity in mundane affairs
afforded a strong presumption that in things celestial he might be wise.
To obtain support for this hypothesis she had only to think over the
lives of many eminent astronomers.
She waited feverishly for the flourish of trumpets from afar, by which
she expected the announcement of his discovery to be greeted. Knowing
that immediate intelligence of the outburst would be brought to her by
himself, she watched from the windows of the Great House each morning for
a sight of his figure hastening down the glade.
But he did not come.
A long array of wet days passed their dreary shapes before her, and made
the waiting still more tedious. On one of these occasions she ran across
to the tower, at the risk of a severe cold. The door was locked.
Two days after she went again. The door was locked still. But this was
only to be expected in such weather. Yet she would have gone on to his
house, had there not been one reason too many against such precipitancy.
As astronomer and astronomer there was no harm in their meetings; but as
woman and man she feared them.
Ten days passed without a sight of him; ten blurred and dreary days,
during which the whole landscape dripped like a mop; the park trees
swabbed the gravel from the drive, while the sky was a zinc-coloured
archi-vault of immovable cloud. It seemed as if the whole science of
astronomy had never been real, and that the heavenly bodies, with their
motions, were as theoretical as the lines and circles of a bygone
mathematical problem.